We’ll give you the same update here each month, in the same order Ryan does, starting and ending closest to our home city, San Francisco.

Where’s the Snow?
Some of us were looking forward to sledding down our great neighborhood hills… On February 23rd, the San Francisco Chronicle reported “there is a good chance for snow at sea level in San Francisco for the first time since February 1976, the National Weather Service opines.” But on February 25th, it declared a “love-hate relationship with weather predictions.”

But everyone else got snow, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory:

January 2011 was marked by a series of crippling snow storms across the United States. By January 12, about 71 percent of the country had snow on the ground, the fifth-largest snow cover extent in the last 45 years.

While the snow-pack in the Sierras has been good for California, other states are not so lucky:

With all the snow, it would be easy to think that the United States received plenty of winter moisture, but snow is deceptive… January 2011 was the ninth-driest January in the United States in 117 years. The southern half of the country was particularly hard hit. New Mexico experienced its driest January on record.

Expedition to the Philippines
We mentioned this in Earth Update last month, but head Academy researcher Terry Gosliner outlined his plans, hopes and dreams for the upcoming Hearst Expedition to the Philippines at Nightlife last night. Academy scientists, working with Filipino researchers, will explore three research arenas in the country: shallow-water reefs, deep-sea,  and terrestrial and freshwater. The expedition will take place from April 25th through June 10th– look for updates here.

Australia and New Zealand Updates
Australia, land of floods, droughts and cyclones. Tropical Cyclones Diane and Carlos both hovered off the coast of Western Australia last month and Atu approached the north island of New Zealand. (Click on the links for more stunning images from the Earth Observatory.)

The 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Christchurch last month was surprising in the amount of damage it amassed. From Earth Observatory:

Besides striking closer to a major population center, the 6.3-magnitude Christchurch earthquake had a depth of just 5 kilometers (3 miles). The New Zealand Herald reported that, whereas the Darfield quake [September 2010] happened in the early morning hours, the February 22 quake struck at the “worst possible time” of day—at the lunch hour when city streets were crowded with shoppers, diners, office workers, and school children. Moreover, some of the buildings that collapsed may have been weakened by the September 2010 quake.

It’s also possible that the quake could have been magnified by volcanic rock.

Let’s look to some beauty of the area. The image above is not a painting; it shows the annual summer phytoplankton bloom, taken February 10th.

Goodbye Glory
Ryan reported on the Glory satellite launch to his NightLife crowd last night. Sadly, only a few hours later, early this morning, the climate-data gathering spacecraft failed to separate from the Taurus XL rocket and plunged somewhere into the South Pacific. We saw this same thing only two years ago with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite. You can read more here.

If you’re in the area, come visit the Academy for NightLife on April 7th for the next “Earth Update,” when Ryan and Tim will give you more of the latest news on Academy research and our home planet.

NASA image by Norman Kuring

As if Saturn wasn’t already considered drop-dead gorgeous. And as if Cassini wasn’t already the luckiest satellite in the skies. Using Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS), scientists gathered data to create beautiful images and even a video of auroras on the ringed planet. Released just today, these are truly a must see!

Also published today, in the journal Science, independent researchers have calculated the vastness of the BP oil spill by viewing videos of the underwater oil gushing. From Science News:

Crone and Tolstoy used an optical technique known as flow velocimetry. In this approach, the volume of a roiling plume is estimated by using video or a series of photos to measure the movements of a host of distinguishing features over a short period of time. Computers can then calculate likely flow volumes based on the plume’s size and density.

And their numbers exceed the government estimate by about 300,000 barrels (or 12.6 million gallons) of oil.

Earlier this week, scientists published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describing the affect of dust on Colorado’s snowpack. According to Reuters and Yale Environment 360:

Dust created by intensifying human activities in the southwestern United States has caused snow in the Rocky Mountains to melt earlier over the last 150 years and has reduced runoff into the Colorado River basin by about 5 percent, according to a new study.

For a drought-prone area, this makes a potentially bad situation worse.

So, now for a bit of good news. A month ago, we reported on Conservation International’s launch of a worldwide search for 100 species or so of amphibians that were possibly extinct. This week, they announced three of those species were spotted—two in Africa and one in Mexico. You can read more at the 80beats blog on Discover.

Which science news items caught your eye this week? Let us know!